Comment by jasonkester | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jasonkester | Hacker News Reader

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> I'm focusing specifically on short-term work

Exactly my point. So are those ten thousand bottom scraper sites I mention.

What I'm asking is how you intend to stop the same people who post their "Groupon Clone: $500 budget" nonsense on those 'lance sites off your list?

And how you're planning to stop the 100-500 "sir, we are professional A++++++++ software firm. we review your project and are ready to start immediately" responses that will be auto-spammed to every job on your list?

Those are actually good problems to solve, and a site that solved them would be a great win for the small fraction of freelance work that's actually conducted above board by talented developers and non-flaky clients. But a quick spin through what you've presented here makes it seem like your quick & dirty approach will actually amplify those problems.

Both great questions.

On the project side, I hand approve every post. Spam/recruiter junk/etc. gets deleted and the email address blacklisted.

For the talent side, yes, you're right; there's a good potential for A++++++++ firm nonsense.

The quick and dirty approach is probably not accurately reflecting the work I've put in/will be putting in behind the scenes, through methods we've developed at Forrst for dealing with reputation, throttling one's ability to mass-contact project owners, anonymizing email on both sides with a one-click "this is spam" function, and so forth.

Ultimately, I agree -- they're great (and hard) problems to solve, and I'm eager to do so.

> On the project side, I hand approve every post. Spam/recruiter junk/etc. gets deleted and the email address blacklisted.

Do you have a plan for scaling that up? ("I'm gonna hire more warm bodies" is an acceptable answer, imo.)

Heh, honestly that's probably what I'll do. We (Forrst) can certainly share the load if/when it becomes necessary.

What thoughts are you having for automating that process? it seems to me if that if you can scale it up you win!

Project approval will likely just be a matter of human scale. It takes < 1 min to figure out if it's going to be approved or not. I do have a bunch of automation around stuff like "this isn't quite ready to go out because of X/Y/Z, click here to edit it" and so forth.

Talent side is more interesting. I'm leveraging Forrst's reputation engine to do some behind the scenes ranking of users, at least for the users who have Forrst accounts. Have sketched out some other ideas, but first want to see how the first email fares.

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